A Performance Evaluation of Energy Efficient Schemes for Green Office Networks

Power consumption in office networks has become a major issue due to its running cost. In order to reduce the power consumption, several approaches have been proposed such as Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) and Energy Efficient Wireless aggregation (EEW). In this research, we develop an analytical model and apply the model to evaluate and compare performance of the existing technologies. The parameters of interest include the number and the average throughput of clients. Our analysis results show that EEW is more efficient than EEE with a small number of clients or low average throughput. Motivated by this result, we examine the possibility of conserving more power by introducing a combination of EEE and EEW, called EEEW. EEEW can take advantage of both EEE as well as EEW and should be very strong against the varying conditions of the network. We found that when the average throughput of clients is less than 0.5Mbps, the combination can save more than 66% of the power consumed by EEE. We also describe EEEWS, a combination of EEEW and link-sleep techniques which presents a further power saving potential.